


Redemption

by hauntedjaeger (saellys), sun_dance



Category: Mad Max: Fury Road, Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Tumblr Made Us Do It, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-31 07:44:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3969703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sun_dance/pseuds/sun_dance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s Raleigh who points out that the giant bin of water perched precariously underneath a long-dripping spigot in the middle of nowhere is a fucking trap, but Mako ignores it, slides lithely out of the war rig with her good arm trailing down the metal as she goes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redemption

It’s Raleigh who points out that the giant bin of water perched precariously underneath a long-dripping spigot in the middle of nowhere is a fucking _trap_ , but Mako ignores it, slides lithely out of the war rig with her good arm trailing down the metal as she goes.

It’s Chuck who leans forward, his head somewhere over Raleigh’s right shoulder while his hand grips Raleigh’s left impossibly hard. They watch, dumbstruck, as the _others_  appear between the crevices of the dunes, rising into being as if from the sand itself. The bikes rattle Raleigh’s bones, reminding him of the ones his family rode together when he was a boy--a lifetime ago--and don’t they all look something like family, all in rags that don’t match but somehow go together, on bikes that had been painted on and painted on and reconstructed and painted on again.

But the tall, slender man with the broad shoulders, the one Mako’s talking to, isn’t the one who comes forward; it’s the man on his right, pushing a pair of ancient goggles up his forehead (and scrambling to pull an eye patch back over his disfigured left eye; there’s a reason he keeps Stacker’s right side covered and not his left). It’s he who slides off his bike and it would fall to the ground, if the woman to his right didn’t grab it from him.

Herc, who stumbles toward Mako, raising his hands like he might touch her face, and Raleigh can see from the loose line of her shoulders how easy it would be for the man to simply twist her neck and end her life, but all he does is pull Mako into a hug so fierce it makes Raleigh’s own chest squeeze.

That’s when Chuck tumbles gracelessly out the door behind Raleigh, hitting the sand on his knees, rearing up and stumbling as he makes his way to the middleground between the oil rig and the dirtbikes.

There’s a half second where the man tries to push Mako behind him, and Raleigh’s halfway out of the truck himself before he sees the two gripping each others arms, and then it’s all over when Chuck pulls back his right arm and knocks the man out with one swing. Raleigh winces in sympathy, but suddenly all hell is breaking loose, the other group surging forward. In the time it takes Raleigh to hit the ground, the others are swarming around Mako and Chuck, drowning them from Raleigh’s sight, and his whole body tenses until he reaches them and realizes--

Mako’s smiling, tear-stained face appears between the shoulders of the three men who share the same face, her forehead pressed to the leader of the other group, hands fisted in his clothing. Then she disappears from sight, the others pressing in as close as they can, and Raleigh realizes with a sinking feeling that he should probably get back in the truck and wait it out.

\- - - 

It’s late, and the moon is high, when Mako goes to Raleigh, wrapped in a faded old blanket. Chuck trails her, as he is wont to do now. Mako is quiet beyond her usual reserve, the quiet that comes from finding out the green place of her childhood is nothing but lime and ash and crows now, that the land turned sour around the time they buried Tamsin in it. She is as quiet as the endless salt laid out before them, and she tells Raleigh she means to ride across it for a hundred and sixty days. 

“Is everyone crossing,” Raleigh asks, “or is Chuck going back to the fuckboys?”

“Warboys,” Chuck snaps for the umpteenth time. 

“My mistake.” Raleigh hides his smile. That’s never getting old. 

“Everyone’s crossing,” Mako says, sparing him a glance over her shoulder. “One of the bikes is yours.” 

Automatically he says, “I’ll make my own way.” Mako dips her head--disappointed, perhaps--and in Raleigh’s head, Yancy’s voice starts up again, mocking. _Where can you go, kid. Hope is a mistake and family is a mistake so you just drive and drive, but are you ever going to find anything like this aga--_

Somewhere behind them, beyond Alison and Naomi huddled together in fitful sleep, beyond Hu keeping watch while his brothers rest, Viviane is cleaning her rifle. Vanessa, muscles cramped and baby kicking, walks by and murmurs for her child to stay put, because everything outside has lost its appeal. 

“Trust me, child,” says Viviane, “Little Chau will come out when she’s ready and not a moment later.” Viviane birthed two babes of her own and midwifed for six more over the years, and she can see Vanessa has less time than she thinks. 

Vanessa figures this is as good a time as any to tell someone. “It’s not Immortan Chau’s.” 

Viviane looks up from her gun. “How did you manage that?” 

“Carefully,” Vanessa says, and twists her mouth. The business of the last two days has given her regrets. She had the one decent man in the Citadel and she left him behind when she climbed onto the war rig. She doesn’t really believe she ought to have stayed, but…

Foolish regrets are still regrets. 

“Let me show you something,” says Viviane. She takes a small bag off the back of her bike and opens it. 

“Are those--”

“Seeds,” Viviane confirms. 

Vanessa stares wonderstruck, and touches the skull with the tiny precious bit of soil and green in it, and the part of her that’s pragmatic says they’ll never find a place where the land isn’t sour, that’s behind them and they’re not going back to the ones who killed the world, but some other little part of her, small as a seed for now, feels like _hope_. 

\- - - 

The journey back to the citadel (Mako’s loathe to call it ‘home’, but that’s what it is now, isn’t it?) is just as treacherous as the one to Sensei, but nobody speaks a word against Raleigh when he points out that what they’ve left behind is infinitely better than what lies ahead; so the caravan turns around, and Raleigh’s hands don’t stop loading guns until they pass Chau and his rogues. Every one of them knows the odds, the likelihood that they won’t all make it, and still they press onward.

Back the way they came, past the wreckage of one of Chau's lackeys that Raleigh single-handedly destroyed. Raleigh saves Chuck’s life, and then Mako catches Raleigh by the ankle, and it’s around the time his head narrowly avoids the rapid pace of the deep treaded tires that he realizes how long it’s been since someone thought his life was worth saving.

There’s a long stretch where he thinks about how to come back from this, from dangling out the drivers’ side of the war rig with nothing but Mako’s metal arm biting into his leather boots, and then he drops a few inches, close enough to the ground that he could reach out and touch it if he wanted to. Somehow, his heart hasn’t beat right out of his chest.

Out of nowhere, Chuck’s feet slam into his back, driving him onto the hood of a man with two arms full of tattoos, spectacles implanted right onto his face. He laughs like a maniac and Raleigh scrambles around the front of the vehicle until he can climb in the side, throwing the driver out and taking his place.

Then they hit the canyon, and Chau slides in front of them, and Raleigh’s not sure they’ll make it through the pass in one piece. There are riders on either side of them, high on the canyon walls, and more behind them, boxing them in. Mako rams into the back of Chau's rig and the whole truck shudders, groaning with the impact.

At some point, Mako slides out of the vehicle, and Raleigh only has a second to think about the blood seeping between the straps of her harness before she’s gone, surging through the open roof hatch and down the front of the hood. Chuck gets her as close as he can, and she jumps, weightless for an eternity before landing gracelessly on the back of the truck in front of them.

She’s dizzy from blood loss and pain lances her side with each breath, but she keeps going, throwing one, two, three of Chau's men off the truck until all that stands between him and death is the apparatus in his face. The truck in front starts to speed off, until Alison takes the leap after Mako and pushes Chau out the door, sliding into the seat in his place. Mako slumps against the back of the cab, and Raleigh gets the others moving; first Naomi, then she helps him with Vanessa, then Herc, then Viviane. Raleigh goes last, glancing back at Chuck, who gives him a nod, but before he or Stacker can follow them the war rig starts to drag, falling away.

The cry of protest rips from Raleigh’s throat without him noticing, and then he notices the garrote around Chuck’s throat, the blur of limbs as Stacker fights off another one, and in the blink of an eye Chuck twists the wheel, hard, sending the entire rig in a sideways spiral that ensures the cab--along with all of its inhabitants--is crushed.

The wreckage stops the others from following, and Alison takes them all the way to the citadel without a single backward glance.


End file.
